Evolution

Evolution is the chapter that asks five questions and answers them with evidence rather than with mechanism alone: how life began, what shows that it has changed, who first explained the change, how the change actually works, and where our own species came from. It opens on the early earth - the primitive atmosphere, the splitting of water vapour and the filling of the oceans - and on the accounts people held before the modern one, from special creation and spontaneous generation to panspermia, with Pasteur's pair of flasks and Oparin, Haldane and Miller's sealed experiment. The evidence follows: fossils in dated strata, homologous and analogous organs and the two processes behind them, vestigial organs, embryos and the universal genetic code, and adaptive radiation from Darwin's finches to the Australian marsupials. The second half turns to the theories and the mechanisms - Lamarck, Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, Wallace, de Vries and the Modern Synthetic theory, then mutation and recombination, gene flow, genetic drift with the founder effect and the bottleneck, the Hardy-Weinberg principle and the agencies that disturb it, the three types of natural selection and industrial melanism - and closes on the human line from Dryopithecus to Homo sapiens. Two practice sections of twenty questions each, and a closing set of eighteen genuine NEET items drawn verbatim from the 2019 to 2026 papers, including the 2026 re-test, so you can measure yourself against the real thing.